The Way We Live Now: 11-05-00: On Language; Baldfaced

By William Safire

Published: November 5, 2000

As the 2000 campaigners practice their endgamesmanship, each side accuses the other of baldfaced lies. In some instances, the accusers prefer barefaced lies, and in a Virginia race, the mouth-filling modifier has come out sounding like boldfaced lies.

Where does the truth lie? (Yes, in this instance, the truth does lie; unless your subject is a hen, lay must have an object.)

It seems that the unadorned lie no longer has its old puissance. Time was, that word was so inflammatory as to need a euphemism: fib was the slang gentler, prevarication the bookish term. But to score as an emphatic charge, it now needs an adjective. ''That's a dirty lie'' used to have a ring to it, but that adjective is now almost exclusively applied to jokes and lyrics. ''Damned lie,'' once popular, is too closely associated with statistics.

The denunciator has a menu from which to choose: outright is forthright, blatant has a ring to it, flat is sharp (though it is often mistakenly replaced by flat-out, which lacks the disapproving connotation) and flagrant lends itself to mispronunciation by stumbling speakers as fragrant.

What is a designated finger-pointer to do when this anti-dissembly line turns out no insightful inciting to outrage? Into vituperation's void steps baldfaced, giving the lie to the new listlessness of the overused lie. At the request of Robert and Claudia Wasserman of Remsenburg, N.Y., let us deconstruct the campaigners' favorite counterpunch intensifier.

Shakespeare coined first barefaced and then boldfaced. The first referred to beardless youth: ''Some of your French Crownes have no hair at all,'' Quince tells Bottom in ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' as he casts a play, ''and then you will play bare-faced.'' The meaning of barefaced was clearly ''without whiskers,'' which led to senses of ''unconcealed, open.'' In time, this innocent lack of disguise took on the color of shamelessness. In Laurence Sterne's ''Tristram Shandy'' (1760), we have, ''See the barefaced villain, how he cheats, lies, perjures, robs, murders!'' (This is the sense today's political campaigners have in mind.)

A year after his 1590 coinage of barefaced, Shakespeare, in ''Henry VI, Part 1,'' had Lord Talbot speak of ''proud desire of bold-faced Victory'' after he rescues his son, John, on the French battlefield; that meant ''confident,'' a sense that soon turned into ''impudent,'' as confidence so often does. Not until 1884 did the Italian printer Giambattista Bodoni use boldface to describe a darkly thick, or bold, typeface, which looks like this and is easily distinguished from lightface type.

From bare and bold to bald: The etymology of baldfaced should interest angry animal rights advocates. All the early uses referred to animals: in 1648, ''a bawld-facd heighfer''; in 1677, ''a sorrel Mare . . . bald-faced''; and in 1861, ''our bald-faced hornet.'' And of course, the symbol of America was ''the bald eagle.'' In its original sense, bald did not mean ''hairless, shiny-pated, cueball-like, suedeheaded.'' It meant ''white.'' The top of our symbolic eagle's head is not featherless; the last time I patted one, its head and neck were covered with smooth white feathers. In the 13th century, the balled coot was a water bird with a white mark on its forehead, lingering in the lingo today in the simile bald as a coot. Baldfaced whiskey was a 19th-century Americanism for pale, raw liquor, and a boiled, biled or bald-faced shirt was a cowboy's go-to-meetin' white shirt. The Celtic bal meant ''a white mark,'' and the Sanskrit bhala, ''forehead,'' from the Indo-European bhel, ''white, shining.'' Had enough? At bottom, it's white. That's why horses with white markings on their noses are often called Old Baldy, same as the snow-covered mountain.

In current use, then, baldfaced lie is the most popular because it sounds most

resounding; barefaced lie continues to run strong with no connotation of any pursuit of the hirsute; and boldfaced lie sounds like a printer's error. In every case, kill the hyphen.

Crying Woof!

''We can sell all the woof tickets we want,'' the Washington Wizards' basketball forward, Juwan Howard, said, but ''it's about performance out there. . . . We've got to get it together.''

As early as 1985, Clarence Page of The Chicago Tribune defined selling woof tickets as ''an invitation to fight.'' In 1996, Jane Kennedy of The San Francisco Examiner called it ''telling lies.'' In The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Betty Parham and Gerrie Ferris wrote in 1992, ''Although its origin is uncertain, 'woof ticket' is a somewhat dated phrase that refers to an outrageous or exaggerated boast meant to intimidate or impress the listener.'' Woof is a Black English pronunciation of ''wolf.'' According to Geneva Smitherman's 1994 ''Black Talk,'' a woof ticket is ''a verbal threat, which one sells to somebody; may or may not be real. Often used as a strategy to make another person back down and surrender to what that person perceives as a superior power.''

Tom McIntyre, professor of special education at Hunter College in New York, noted nearly a decade ago: ''Woofing is especially effective against those who are unfamiliar with it and don't realize that it is most often 'all show and no go.' . . . The menacing behavior can usually be defused and eliminated by informed, tactful action.'' He advised teachers to ''look secure and self-assured while you withdraw.''

In the context of the basketball star Howard's remarks, woof tickets are not to be bought; on the contrary, he uses the phrase to show that performance, and not intimidating attitude, is needed to ''get it together.''